Let's imagine the following thought experiment. A primary school child finds out that besides all the other colours she is aware of, there is another colour called ultraviolet (UV) light, unobservable to human eyes. A couple of years later she learns in a Physics class that colours are not actually inherent to an object, but that the human eye and brain translate the light that is reflected from the object into colours. The child's epistemological-ontological understanding of reality goes through three stages. Before she hears about UV light, she considers herself an omnipotent observer; reality is that what she observes and nothing more. Next, she acknowledges her inability to see some things (i.e. the UV light), but what she observes (i.e. the colour red) still reflects reality. Let's call this the deficit model. Finally, she realizes that UV light is not an exception to 'the rule' – see later discussion on Wittgenstein (1953) – but that what is real and what she can observe do not have to be the same. Let's call this the decolonised phenomenological model (DPM); the 'decolonised' is supposed to signify that her experience of 'otherness' (UV light) challenged her own phenomenology of the world.
The thought experiment has a few limitations. The progression from the omnipotent observer to the DPM was bridged through the deficit model, but is such a bridge necessary? And how do we know that the DPM represents the real? The latter question of verification is potentially the most important and shall be explored later with the help of theorists such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Roy Bhaskar. Yet, as these authors characteristically do not like using examples, we have to bring in our own. In the case above, the essay question was taken literally by discussing 'observable' reality in relation to vision. This example, similar to Donna Haraway’s (1988) use of her dog's vision to introduce feminist epistemologies, was chosen because of its intuitive grasp. However, vision is a single modality, thus the critical reader might already be contemplating other ways our perception of the world does not equate to reality. To give a few examples, the anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2018) argues that beliefs in 'the individual', 'the real', 'science', 'the economy' and many more (see p.137) are colonial constructions, and may not represent reality. Picking up on such decolonial critiques, the following text will discuss whether what we perceive to be ‘the individual’ is actually real. Not wanting to take modernity as an initial reference point, the ‘individual’ purposefully will be left undefined. Instead it will be conceptualised using examples that challenge it. The examples examined will be the idea ‘ubuntu’ from the Bantu languages, the concept of ‘distributed agency’ in nature/ the non-human, and neuroscientific research into psychedelics and meditation. When discussing these cases, this essay will take the stance, that our ability to verify what is real is constrained by the limits of our language and experience, and that our social activity shapes such limits. Therefore, it will be argued that our phenomenology should be understood as a “picture (…) representing a possibility of existence” (Wittgenstein, 1922, 2.201), and the exploration of other ‘possibilities’ is seen as fruitful.
Is ‘the individual’ real or constructed? If the latter is the case, is such construction colonial? Following Escobar’s (2018) ‘modernity/coloniality research program’, the construction of individuals as separate entities can be understood historically by looking at Western liberal theory’s endowment of individual rights and free will, or by Descartes’ subject-object dualism. Regarding the latter, the case can be made that Europe’s social reproduction of itself as reflecting subjects, and indigenous cultures as objects (i.e. lacking a soul), was a means to legitimise their colonial exploitation (see Quijano, 2007). Now accrediting ourselves with historical hindsight, which (mostly) frowns upon the dehumanisation of colonial victims, we assign all humans a ‘subject’ status and give them human rights. Yet is it possible this very practice is still inherently colonial? If ‘the individual’ is not real, is categorising humans as individuals a form of colonial indoctrination? Escobar (2007, p.183) writes “the triumph of the modern lies precisely in its having become universal.” The problem is that with modern science, universality is often taken as evidence that something is real – see Geertz’ (1973, p.40) discussion on ‘consensus gentium’. Hence, there is an inherent tension about whether the common belief in the individual is constitutive of its ‘truth-function’ (see Wittgenstein, 1922) or its colonial legacy.
Therefore, it may be beneficial to look at cases where the universality of the individual has been challenged. Adopting the framework of the introductory thought experiment, we shall now consider the idea ‘ubuntu’ from the Bantu languages in southern Africa. Choosing the translation “I am because you are” for ubuntu, de Sousa Santos (2018, p.10) describes it as a “call for an ontology of co-being and coexisting.” He also introduces the term ‘umuntu’, which means the “emergence of homo loquens, who is simultaneously a homo sapiens” (p.304). In dialogue with de Sousa Santos, Ramose (2016) explains how, as the two terms share the same suffix ‘ntu’, ontologically speaking they are co-constituted. Thus, when Ramose describes ubuntu as a normative idea, he argues that the criteria to be human cannot be separated from one’s duties to the community. De Sousa Santos responds to Ramose by contrasting ubuntu to individualistic Western culture, where there is a larger emphasis on human rights than duties. Would incorporating the idea of ubuntu lead to a DPM of the individual? Assuming value neutrality as a necessary condition for empirical research, modern thinkers might emphasise that the concept’s normative character might hinder its efficacy in making claims about ‘the real’. Yet, if we follow Quijano’s (2007, p.177) argument that “all systematic production of knowledge is associated with a perspective of totality”, we might realise that the belief in human individuals and rights is equally politically situated as that of ubuntu. The only difference is that the latter more readily acknowledges its situatedness.
So far, the analysis has been restricted to the perception of the individual through the lens of humanity. Thus, if we accept that empirical realism is inherently anthropomorphic (Bhaskar, 2008), a consideration of the non-human is warranted. One could go down the path of epistemology, arguing that human experience is shaped by a specific configuration of sensory processing, and seek to investigate the level of congruence or incongruence in phenomenological experience across species. Following this path, research into the ‘anthropic bias’ has been explored theoretically using Bayesian assumptions and probability theorem (see Bostrom, 2010). However, the lack of intelligent communication across species hinders any elaborate ways of verifying interspecies phenomenological experiences. Following a different research avenue, anthropological studies have found that some indigenous groups have developed relational ontologies connecting them to nature/ the non-human. For example, the term ‘pachamama’ in the constitution of Ecuador (see de Sousa Santos, 2018) conceptualises humans and nature as a subject-subject relationship, and some Melanesian and Amazonian understanding of self and personhood differs significantly from that of the West (see Escobar, 2018, p.123). In these cases, we may apply the concept of “distributed agency – which suggests that agency is not the result of discrete actions by single subjects acting intentionally but largely the effect of complex heterogeneous networks of humans and nonhumans” (ibid, p.174). The argument here is not that a DPM of the individual is achieved by adopting the epistemological lens of the non-human – currently, we are incapable of doing so. Instead, it is argued that our perception, and hence our understanding of ‘the individual’ is presupposed by our social interactions with nature/ the non-human. This idea is usefully conceptualised in Anne Willies’ “double movement of ontological designing”, which argues that when “we design our world, our world designs us back – in short, design designs” (ibid, p.392). Thus, when indigenous groups’ models of the world are constituted by co-living and social activity with nature/ the non-human, this will likely act as a reference point for how the self, the individual, and the relational are constructed.
Finally, let’s consider some experimental research. Recent neuroimaging studies into classic psychedelics have developed the ‘entropic brain hypothesis’ (for a brief overview see Carhart-Harris, 2019). This research argues that psychedelics intake temporarily leads to more unpredictable connectivity patterns and the disintegration of some intrinsic networks in the brain. Here, the disintegration of the default mode network has been associated with the common psychedelic symptom of ‘ego-dissolution’, where participants describe losing their sense of self, and feeling more connected to nature and the universe. Taking a design theory perspective (see Escobar, 2018) on psychedelics-induced ego-dissolution, Falcon (2020) argues that our “belief in the individual, devoid of its relational embeddedness” (p.7) could be ‘decolonised’ using psychedelics. Similarly, neuroimaging research with meditation experts has associated the default mode network with our sense of self (Laukkonen and Slagter, 2020). This research draws on the predictive processing paradigm in neuroscience, which argues that instead of processing all sensory stimuli, our brain constructs much of our phenomenological experience – including the self. The authors thus argue that the self – especially the narrative self – is deconstructed when practising certain meditation techniques. Thus, these two areas of experimental research not only reveal practices – psychedelics use and meditation – which correspond to a DPM of the individual, but also found a biological counterpart to such experience.
The account of whether the individual is real or construction has been very descriptive so far. Making use of the language theorists Wittgenstein and Winch, the critical realist Bhaskar, and the anthropologist Geertz the following will scrutinize the above more critically, and examine the cases comparatively. The ‘early Wittgenstein’ (1922) may be conceptualised using his ‘square mesh’ metaphor for Newtonian mechanics; “Let us imagine a white surface with irregular black spots on it. We then say that whatever kind of picture these make, I can always approximate as closely as I wish to the description of it by covering the surface with a sufficiently fine square mesh, and then saying of every square whether it is black or white” (6.341). Equating the white surface with dots as the world, and the mesh as our picture of the world, Wittgenstein argues that instead of square mesh, the grid of mesh also could have been constituted by triangles or hexagons. He continues to argue that we can only ‘detect’ Newtonian mechanics in the real world under the conditions of the language constructions, that makes sense (“Sinn”) to us. However, Wittgenstein does not deny that our picture of Newtonian mechanics may be congruent with reality – they may share a “logical form” (2.18). Yet because of “the limits of language mean the limits of my world” (5.62), we have to consider our phenomenology as one ‘possibility’ of the world, and thus entertain other possibilities. In short, Wittgenstein does not have an answer to the question of verification raised in the introduction.
The ‘early Wittgenstein’ resonates with Bhaskar’s (2008) distinction between the “conjunction of events” (p.2) experienced by humans and the “generative mechanisms” (p.3) that produce ‘”intransitive objects” – objects which “endure and act quite independently of men” (p.6). How does this relate to our example cases? Contrasting, ‘ubuntu’ with the ‘default mode network’ in the brain, one could make the case that whilst the creation of the former is dependent on the social activity of man, the latter is an intransitive object. On the other hand, if we assume that ‘the individual’ or ‘self’ is indeed constructed, then is finding the biological counterpart to it not too different from ‘detecting’ that a square in the ‘Wittgensteinian mesh is black?
To answer this question, let’s consider the language theory of ‘rule following’ as introduced by the ‘late Wittgenstein’ (1953) – and further developed by Winch (1958). In short, their argument is that language constructions do not represent the internal substances of objects in reality but represent their use in social activity. The reason that objects seem ‘so real’ is because other actors seem to be following the same rules within the ‘language games’ of social activity. Thus, when we observe different ontological conceptions of ‘the individual’ – i.e. ‘ubuntu’ or ‘distributed agency’ in the non-human – this evident of cross-cultural diversity in social activity, (game) rules, and (non-human) actors. The significance of the triad relationship between the (human) individual, language and social activity is especially well illustrated by the ubuntu-umuntu case, which combines the notions of ‘homo sapiens’, ‘homo loquens’ and social duty ontologically.
What about the research with psychedelics and meditation? A neuroscientist may argue that social factors may be controlled for by neuroimaging the brain in an experimental setting. In response, Geertz’ (1973, p.37) would warn us from a "stratigraphic conception of the relations between biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors in human life”, where humans are “composite of ‘levels’, each superimposed upon those beneath it and underpinning those above it”. This is intuitively problematic, but is a ‘decolonial neuroscience’ any better? A neuroscientist – prompted by literature on ‘relationality’ – may conceptualise ‘the individual’ as one layer in a stratigraphic conception, which must be “peeled off” (p.37) to reach the layer below. Both scenarios are problematic because in the search for a ‘universal base’ – ‘the biological’/ ‘the relational’ – the research process might have reduced components of the “generative mechanisms” (see Bhaskar, 2008) that make up reality. We do not know whether it has, but following Wittgenstein (1922) we should entertain such a possibility.
In conclusion, we cannot verify whether ‘the individual’ is real or constructed. When studying it we should be cautious about appropriating colonisation as universalism and avoid internalising a stratigraphic conception of the real in ‘controlled’ experimental research. Yet, neither should we fall for an essentialised decolonial critique. When authors like Escobar (2018) appeal for a “pluriverse” and pick up on slogans from social movements – i.e. the Zapatista movement: “A world where many worlds fit” – they attempt to carve a political space for ontologies suppressed by colonisation. However, although we should consider our own perception of the world as one of many ‘possibilities’, any constructive science of ‘the real’ must presuppose that there is fixed world; the lack thereof would reduce all notions of ‘intransitive objects’ to ontological relativism, and thus reduce science’s explanatory power to a purely descriptive practice. I suppose this is why Wittgenstein (1922) begins the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the ontological assumption “the world is all that is the case” (1.1).
I wrote this essay for my philosophy of social science class, I hope you enjoyed it.
References
Bhaskar, R., 2008. A realist theory of science. Rev. ed. ed. London and New York: Routledge. Bostrom, N., 2010. Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy New York and London: Routledge.
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de Sousa Santos, B., 2018. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South Durham and London: Duke University Press.
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Escobar, A., 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Falcon, J., 2020. Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness. Design and Culture, pp. 1-21.
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Ramose, M.B. and de Sousa Santos, B., 2016. Conversations of The World - Mogobe B Ramose and Boaventura de Sousa Santos [Online]. ALICE CES Available from: https://alice.ces.uc.pt/en/index.php/democratising-democracy/conversation-of-the-worldvi-boaventura-and-mogobe-b-ramose/ [Accessed 24/04].
Winch, P., 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge.
Wittgenstein, L., 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,. London: Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L., 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
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